I learnt, while writing this, that my stamina as a writer is no longer what it was when I was 19. I don't even remember how I wrote 5,000 word chapters a night anymore. Staying up any longer than till 7AM already feels like I'm about to collapse, and that's only if I really make myself write the next sentence I see in my head instead of lie down. Staying up till three in the morning is my current average, over whenever dawn was when I was younger.

I wrote this out of notes I patched together from my trip to Bangkok over June. Did you know the smell of city rain is musty? I think it's the bits of oil, sewerage and smoke that make it into the air in cities. I tend to prefer watching the rain behind glass than I do being outside in the middle of it. But I really like monsoons. The sequence for this story turned out quite differently from how I planned it too. It's a little more compact, which I think is a good thing. I had wanted it to be a kind of Dark Water meets a very different sort of A Foreigner's View of the River. It's still like A Foreigner's View of the River, but less vague (I hope).

Stuff that didn't make it in: There was this wrecking site next to our apartment, for example, I wanted to use for sound effects. From dawn till dusk, there were the sounds of a motel getting demolished. The pounding the wrecking ball made breaking walls was a special kind of distracting sound. The workers stayed on site, in these plywood huts built next to the wreckage. There was a mutual clothesline and women, but I was never able to catch lights on in the huts at night. It's probably a good thing I didn't go the Japanese horror movie route...